victor90

Using a N3.6m solar system (8 panels, 10kwh battery), I am able to keep AC turned on 24/7 in my flat with no battery degradation. Let me explain how (this will be a bit long). First of all, in Ikot Ekpene, we have a big family house that has 5 flats in it (used by the various members of my immediate family). One of them is mine, but I am currently renovating it. So I am staying in the other flat. My Dad stays in one of the flats and his inverter was doing poorly, so I bought him the inverter system above (Felicity Lithium Phosphate - 8x 500 watt panels + 10kwh battery and 8kw inverter). The system can be expanded to include a second battery to make 20kwh, but he does not need that, so we kept it. The flat I temporarily moved to did not have solar, so I connected his system so we could share. I figured that this should be enough for both of us, as our daytime draw was 600watts. I observed that during the day I was seeing about 2kw production from the panels from around 11am till 4pm. The batteries fill up in the morning, and basically about 1.5kw is being wasted. Easy fix - turn on a 1 horsepower inverter AC with the mode "80". This makes it consume something like 800watts. Cool through the day. I tried running the bed room AC at night and the battery died in the early hours. Not ideal. The solution - I usually turn off the parlour AC (usually around 5pm), and the battery is close to 100%. The room AC I used a programmable switch which turns the AC on for 10-20 minutes every hour. The bedroom is smaller and more enclosed, so it stays very cold for the entire night. The power consumption - normally the AC would consume ~900wh in an hour, so with this system I drop consumption to maybe 200wh. If I turn it on 8 times, that's total consumption of 1600wh. More than enough left over for the battery to go through the night. So now I have full daytime and nighttime AC on a budget.